At 7:15 PM Friday the 13th of September 1996 my first wife passed away. This after fifty seven years, one month, twenty two hours and forty five minutes of marriage.

For several years we had discussed this situation and both agreed that on the death of one, the survivor should remarry.

It was with this agreement in mind that I had no sense of guilt or disloyalty that after a short period of time I started looking for a new wife.

Where does one start such a search? Since I’m a lousy Kraut, who can’t stand the taste of beer, the tavern scene was out. Since I also don’t like liquor the bar scene was out as well.

I tried going to a number of churches. I found no one. My sister-in-law arranged a blind date with a lady from her church. After several dinner dates I found no bells or whistles. I dropped that association. I went to a few Elderhostel programs. One was at the Grand Canyon. Here I found a lady I could quite easily be interested in. One very large problem, she was happily married to a great guy.

As most of you know, Willis Knox and I play golf together pretty close to five days a week. One morning he suggested that I should join the Write Your Life Story class. It sounded interesting so I entered the group.

Here I found, like Charlie Brown of the Peanuts Comic Strip, the pretty little red haired girl. One obvious big fly in the ointment was that she was so much younger than I was. Hence the search went on.

One Tuesday I missed the class, so, I went to the Thursday class. There I met a lady who looked very sharp and trim in her white slacks. When I picked her up she was dressed just like my first wife’s grandmother. I decided this wasn’t where I wanted to go.

My daughter-in-law was a dental hygienist in the Seattle area and said she had a client that would make a perfect wife. She set up a dinner date for the four of us at my favorite Chinese restaurant in Seattle. When we picked her up at her home, my expectation died. I’m sure she was at least as old as I was, plus she had a cat which was a definite no-no.

I continued with the writing class and continued my admiration of the pretty little red haired girl. One day she came to class with her birthday cake, saying she had reached the big 0. Since one had to be sixty years old to get into the class, she had to have just had her seventieth birthday. Since I was not quite eighty two yet, it meant I wasn’t quite twelve years older than she.

Heck, my father was a little over ten years older than my mother and they were married for over sixty years. I figured it was worth a shot. I stiffened my backbone and asked Fay to go out to dinner. I halfway expected her to say, "Get away from me you dirty old man". To my delight, she said that would be nice.

That was in February of 1999. It didn’t take many months for me to convince her that we could be happily married.

We, therefor, were married at the little Congregational Church in Cathlamet, Washington on Sept 25th 1999 by Reverend Joan Ham.

I have been very fortunate to have had two lovely little red haired wives.